They chose the name well.

Hirpo. It comes from the Hirpini, the Oscan-Samnite people who inhabited this land before the Romans. They were named after the wolf — hirpus, in Oscan. Tough people, of the mountains, used to staying at the margins of every empire that passed by. Someone at the ASL of Avellino decided that the new digital avatar based on artificial intelligence should be called that. Not ChatBot. Not Virtual Assistant. Hirpo. I thought about it for a while, and I concluded it is the most provincial thing — in the best sense — they could have done.

What happened

Last April 13th, the General Director of the ASL of Avellino, Maria Concetta Conte, presented at a press conference a project already operational: a digital avatar on WhatsApp that responds in real time about the emergency room, waiting lists, and CUP bookings. Without an operator. The project runs on PNRR Health funds. It is not an experiment. It is on.

Why I tell this story here

This section is called “The Nearest Town.” Usually it ends up covering municipalities — the notices, the resolutions, the tender specifications read at night on the municipal notice board. But the ASL of Avellino covers a territory made almost entirely of small towns. Montella, Nusco, Lacedonia, Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi. Places where the family doctor serves three villages at once, where the on-call doctor’s hours are never enough, where calling the CUP means waiting on hold while you have already used up your phone credit. Hirpo doesn’t solve any of this. It is not a doctor. It does not shorten surgery wait times. It does not bring a clinic where there is none. But it answers at eleven at night to “when will my lab results arrive?” And for those who live far from everything, that is not a detail.

The name, again

The ASL could have called it a thousand other ways. An acronym, a startup name, something international and neutral. Instead, they chose a name that comes from the history of this territory. A name that, if you are not from Irpinia, you may not even know how to pronounce. Usually technology arrives from outside and carries other people’s names. Names in English, or at least neutral, universal names, without roots. Here someone did the opposite: they took a tool that came from far away and put a local name on it. They called by the name of the wolf something that helps people find their way through the labyrinth of public healthcare. It is in that gesture that I find something right.

What I don’t know

I don’t know if Hirpo works well. I haven’t used it. I don’t know if it understands questions with typos, if it holds up when you ask it a strange question, if in six months it will still be active or if it will have become one of those projects presented at a press conference and then forgotten in a drawer. These are the right questions. And I don’t have the answers. What I know is that someone took a technology that we usually see applied elsewhere, brought it here, gave it one of our names, and put it to do something concrete. In a territory where services close before it gets dark, having something that answers at night is not nothing. It is not the revolution. But it is a beginning with a good name.

Sources: ITV Online, April 13, 2026; Irpinia Oggi, April 2026.